No thanks Kathryn Stockett, I don't want to be "The
Help"
 Joyce Ladner
August, 2011

[Issued in response to
the movie "The Help" which was based on the best-selling novel of
the same name by Kathryn Stockett.]

I was a maid in high school. I cleaned white peoples houses on Saturdays
and after school. I cleaned, washed and ironed clothes and waxed the
kitchen floor for $3.00 and twenty cents, the latter being for bus fare.
I came from a family of nine children so this was the only way I could
make spending money. There were no fast food places like McDonald's
during the fifties for had they existed I would have had a part-time job
at one of them to get spending money.

There is nothing glorious about cleaning up after dirty people
and nothing like being exploited by people who don't give a damn
about you. I have written about this in my memoir that I am
almost finished writing. Maids are invisible and their lives are
invisible to their white employers.

When I was fourteen, I quit a job when the white girl who was my age
DEMANDED that I wash her blood stained underwear from her menstrual
period. When her mother came home from work she told her that I refused
to do so and her Mother lit into me saying I thought I was too good to
wash these clothes. Before I left that day I made sure that the pancakes
Jo Lee demanded that I make for her included dirty dishwater instead of
water or milk, and I fried them with the ring of grease around their
nasty kitchen sink instead of lard. Jo Lee praised me for making what
she described as the best pancakes she'd ever eaten.

As I stood there and watched her eat, I felt vindicated because I
had gotten her back in the only way I felt I could. Had I
verbally lashed out at her in a tit for tat her mother could have
had me arrested for being uppity or she could have done so on
some trumped up charges. It was not inconceivable that her mother
could have had some mean men torch our home. I never took pride
in what I did but as I held back my salty tears that Saturday
morning I couldn't think of any other way to fight back for being
called a Nigger and being told that I "had" to wash her soiled
underwear. "Who do you think you are?" she had demanded. "You
think you too good to wash my clothes? You're just a Nigger!" she
shouted. My regret that day was that I couldn't tell her that I had fed
her dirty dishwater and grease from the sink.

A year later when Jo Lee and I were fifteen years old, I heard from
my neighbor who sent me to work at Jo Lee's home that she had gotten
married because she was pregnant. She and her high school drop-out
husband were living in a shotgun house in the white people's poor
section of town.

Can you imagine Jo Lee writing a book about me, my feelings, dreams,
thoughts, aspirations and goals? Can you imagine Jo Lee being able to
step out of her role of racial superiority long enough to give voice to
me and my family? Could Jo Lee ever be interested in where and how I
lived, went to school, who my friends were, what we did for recreation,
what I studied in school, etc.? Absolutely not. The culture did not
allow for a bi-lateral relationship in which this could have occurred.
Therefore, how can Kathryn Stockett get inside the head of her
characters and truly understand them except from her unilateral and
imaginary perspective? She said as much when she said she didn't know
anything about her family's maid outside the work environment when she
was growing up, and she didn't question it.

It was a rare white employer who had enough humane interest to
know the backgrounds and interests of their maids and other black
employees. My grandmother was a case in point. For as long as I
can remember she worked for a white family. They owned a
furniture store. The woman stayed at home and the man operated
the furniture store. My grandmother cooked, cleaned, and raised
their son and daughter. I was so humiliated as a child when my
grandmother went to the daughter's wedding and was seated alone
in the balcony. She bought a new dress, hat, purse, shoes and
gloves for this occasion and was as proud as a biological mother because
she had been the mother to these two children — Joann
and Johnny. I remember telling her that I was going to college so I
wouldn't have to be a maid. I loved my grandmother very much and I
respected her. She was a kind, decent, caring and giving woman to all of
us kids and to everyone else.

But my grandmother was stuck in the role of maid because that was
the only kind of work she could get. She made $3.00 a day plus
bus fare. I was astounded to learn that from this small salary
she saved enough money for my cousin that she raised to attend
nursing school at Dillard in New Orleans. My grandmother was very
disappointed and sad when my cousin chose marriage over college.
You see, my grandmother wanted my cousin to achieve what she
hadn't been able to accomplish. She wanted to have the vicarious
satisfaction of achievement and she wanted my cousin to have a
better life than her own. I always regretted that she was denied
this because of my cousin's personal choice.

So many of our forebears sacrificed so that we could be nurses and
teachers instead of maids. Which brings me back to Jo Lee and her racist
mother, who called me a Nigger when she got home from work because Jo
Lee told her I refused to wash her underwear. She threatened to fire me
but that was unnecessary because I had no intention of going back to
that job. Although their words stung but didn't break me. I knew I was
not a Nigger and I knew that they were one step up from being poor white
trash even though the mother was a secretary for a lawyer. She was also
his paramour. If anything, their actions caused me to have a stronger
resolve to go to college so that I would not have to be a maid.

As I read Kathryn Stockett's book, I was reminded that I knew a lot
about Jo Lee and her divorced mother and they knew nothing about me
because their white skin privilege made them view me as invisible, a non
entity, and if they had to consider me at all, they saw me as inferior,
as a nobody. All the maids I knew were familiar with the intimate
details of the families for whom they worked. This has been the case
since slavery when black women worked in the houses of white
people....cooked, cleaned their houses, wet nursed their babies...then
their employers turned around and called them dirty and lazy. How can
you entrust someone with cooking your food and raising your children and
then, like a schizophrenic, make a 180 degree turn and look on them as
inferior, alien, and not worthy of knowing anything about them, or
humanizing them? This is the history of black people in America...it is
the history of black domestic workers. It is why my father told my
mother that she would never work for white people. He saw how his
mother's employers tried to dehumanize her by commission and omission.

What is needed is a book by a maid or a group of maids on the white
people they work for. Now that's a book that would probably be a lot
more accurate and insightful, and the dialect would be correct too.
Every time I read one of Kathryn Stockett's "I'm on" instead of "Imma,"
or I'm gonna" I got irritated. I hated it when she spelled "Eula Mae" as
"Yule Mae". I got downright angry when she described the husbands of at
least three maids as no count men who had gone off and left their
families. At the same time, the white men in Stockett's world aren't
absent or "no count" because they have professional jobs, leisure time,
and they have enough money to build separate toilets for their maids.
God forbid that a black maid who cooks their food would ever be allowed
to use the same toilet the white people use. I guess this explains the
fixation segregationists had with toilets....for in so many public
places there were four. One each for black women, black men, white
women, and white men. It's no wonder they didn't have money for
libraries and good schools. It was all spent making sure that no black
person would ever sit on the same toilet a white behind had graced.

I have thought about my conflict with Jo Lee over the years. I have
never taken pride in watching her eat pancakes made with dirty
dishwater. It was not my finest young hour but racism had a way of
dehumanizing everyone. In the absence of racism she and I could have
been equals and friends. But discrimination allowed me to be exploited
and her to behave in the worst way. I was too young to be a maid and she
was too young to be giving me orders. Kathryn Stockett didn't deal with
the dirty and raw outcome of discrimination. The people who populate her
book and movie are viewed through rose colored glasses where everyone
gets along.

Stockett's book has sold millions of copies and made her a very wealthy
woman. The movie will make her even more wealthy and will bring her
greater status. However, Hollywood would never have given this
opportunity to a black author who wrote about black maids in white
households especially in the turbulent South during the struggle for
civil rights. Moreover, there is no reason to rejoice in the good old
times black servants and white employers. The national marketing frenzy
for The Help movie has gone wild. It even includes a full day of
marketing products on the Home Shopping Network (HSN). The New Orleans
chef Emeril has a new line of cooking pots and pans in honor of The
Help. Think of how silly this is: to celebrate maid-ing and
maid-hood when women made $3.00 a day toiling over pots and pans on hot
stoves. No thanks Miz Stockett. I refuse to go back there.